TASHY DID - A LIFE
Hey kids, grand-kids, and any other nosey people who are reading these pages, this is for you to read now or sometime in the future. It may tell you a little
about how life was 60 or so years ago and rather more about me. Why am I doing it?
In the years after my father's death, way back in 1981, I kept thinking of things I wished I'd talked to him about. After my mother's death, just over
thirteen years later, there was less of a knowledge-vacuum because mother talked more about her past.
Just recently, my daughter and I unearthed my mother's diaries which went back to 1929, when she was just 13 years old. This reminded me of the 1998
incident with my 6 year old and I decided to put down here the story of my life so my children and grandchildren could, if they wished, read about what I had done. I would use my
memory and those diaries to build a picture from 1949 to the present day and add some personal observations.
So, here we go. Each week we will have a new year with preceding weeks being archived. In the first few years, as I will have less to say, probably, I will
add some info about your grandparents and their parents.
1980
What started as a good year would end with all manner of emotions and problems. Work was good and in April my section was enlarged to deal with the extra work we now had. This year I was also involved with the first stages of computerisation that we were undertaking. Instead of manually calculating each annual renewal, we were starting to have things done by a computer. My role, lest you assume I suddenly started to understand computer programming, was to liaise with the real programmer so that he could build in all the checks which we would have done manually. For example, with most of these schemes, they were based on each individual receiving an amount of their final salary as a pension and this was based on their years of service. However no one could have more than two-thirds of that final salary. So, if the benefit was based on one sixtieth, the limit was forty years service. The computer needed to know that. There were other peculiarities that had to be input too.
The new woman who joined my section seemed to fit in quite well and joined in with most of the social side too. She was fairly newly married and her husband would come along too. I remember we all took part in a mixed netball game and I discovered that netball is not for me, I like a certain amount of freedom when playing and, firstly, the court was too small but secondly, as I had WA on my back, I could only go in certain parts of the court. Couple this with the fact that you can’t move once you have the ball, and my efforts were probably not helpful to my team. By the way, the WA did not mean I was representing that part of Australia where I would, some 24 years later actually live, nor were 4 letters missing.
The friendliness of all staff was further shown in July of that year when one of them lent us their caravan to have a week’s break at a camp-site called the Moon and Sixpence, where we had already camped a couple of times. They not only lent us the caravan but drove it up there for us and, a week later, came and picked it up. We left my friend, and work colleague, who was still living with us, at home and I can only say I was horrified when we got back, a day earlier than planned, at the mess he seemed happy to live in; mould on the unwashed plates and everywhere so untidy.
My new colleague at work was, with her husband, now spending quite a lot of time with us and it was obvious, to me at any rate, that this was because, alone, they had little in the way of a fun life. One weekend in September she came along to an event we were part of in Wivenhoe and I recall her spending a long time deep in conversation with my wife under a large tree. The upshot was that later that month she left her husband and moved in to lodge with us while she sorted herself out. Big mistake for all. By the way the messy friend had now found his own place.
Relationships are strange. They can work, or not work, at so many different levels. The first problem is that they always involve two people, minimum. These two people will almost certainly have different hopes for the relationship. In the end it boils down to who will compromise the most, who will put up with the bits they don’t like, who will find a way through the difficulties.
The second problem is that we live our lives forwards. Sounds obvious, but by the time we have gone through all the experiences which allow us to learn more, we are usually too old to take advantage of them. When you are young, you don’t know enough about these things. Let’s try an explanation here and say that someone is looking for ten things from their relationship. Let’s number those ten things in order of importance, with 1 being the most important. You find some who meets 1 to 4 and possibly 6, 7 and 9. Because the four most important are met you may overlook the missing ones, at first. By the way, this is a personal view and is based on my own feelings both then and now so don’t tell me it’s not true, it is. Tell me you disagree if you wish but these are my genuine feelings.
After a while you change, you develop as does your partner. Number 5 and 8 have become more significant. The fact your partner doesn’t have these begins to irk. You come into contact with someone who does, although they lack a different four. There is an attraction because you can feel they share more of what you need.
And here the course of action you take defines the rest of your life. Do you accept your lot, which becomes more unattractive the more you think about and, as it does, your partner no doubt notices these changes in you, or even has re-prioritised their needs too, and so you drift further apart. It is quite possible to live, even happily, in this way. Do you sit down and try to talk it through, always to me a waste of time because unless you both agree to change and both feel each has changed the same amount, you will be back to the compromise in the first example. Or, do you go off and try for a new relationship.
Once you have children, the problem becomes even greater. You know that your unhappiness is not helping their lives, you know that any arguing is detrimental to their happiness. My father’s solution was to completely cut all ties. It seems brutal but, in all honesty, the biggest pain was for him as he never saw his eldest daughter grow. I think it was an incredibly brave thing to do but I am not sure it was correct. He thought it was and , of course, it was his decision and by that token correct for him. I may be more selfish and didn’t think I could ever leave my children. Time, and circumstances, and some people’s ability to lie to others, would prove differently.
As I have said many times before, in everything I do, I look for perfection. It’s not all about winning, as some would have you believe. It is all about doing the very best you can. I therefore have always wanted the very best in a relationship and I now know that means that numbers 1-10 must be met; not just seven of them or eight of them but all of them. Of course, it may be impossible but, as I have always believed, what is the point of doing the possible because to know that it is possible someone else must have done it. But, in a relationship, remember two people involved, you cannot achieve this on your own and this applies to personal and working relationships and maybe why I have often entwined them. Until fourteen years ago (written in 2017) I didn’t understand all of this, didn’t know what I was looking for, only knew that each time I started a relationship I believed it was the one but each time became disillusioned. I now know that all I was doing was replacing the bits that were missing but then losing out on other bits. After a while, and because I went almost immediately from one to the next, I started missing the bits I had before. I should point out that to date, after some 49 adult years, I have only had six relationships. A relationship to me means someone you live with; I don’t do one-night stands, I see no point. My intimacy with someone goes far deeper than just in a physical sense. These relationships lasted for 16 years, with a break, six months (the break), eighteen months, four months, eleven and a half years and seven and a half years although, to be honest, I was trying to end the final one for most of the last two years. In all cases, whether they know it or not, my children were the greatest influence. I never allowed them to be a pawn in my dealings with others. I never used them in any way. In the end, in many cases, they did lose out but so did I. I like to feel that, in the end, I lost more than they did and that is how it should be. I made those decisions; I should suffer most, if suffering ensued.
During the latter part of this year all these problems were building up in my mind with regard to my relationships and the lodger we had taken in. They would come to a head early next year.
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